The Green New Deal of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is not the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt. It is not the Fair Deal of Harry Truman nor the Square Deal of Theodore Roosevelt.

But the Green New Deal is the most comprehensive legislative response to climate change yet proposed in the United States Congress. It is a progressive (if vague) statement of ambition on the environment – “a grand strategy,” some call it – at a time when the assault on the planet is reaching a tipping point. That makes it a big deal.

For now, the Green New Deal is just a resolution awaiting study by a committee. Realistically, it has no immediate prospect of becoming law; House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has called it “a green dream,” does not plan to bring it to the floor for a vote.

Even if she did, and the House were to pass it, the Green New Deal would stall in a Senate controlled by conservative Republicans.

Yet whatever the obstacles facing the Green New Deal, we should cheer its arrival. It makes a point, raises a flag, sounds an alarm. It says that the best argument for the Green New Deal in 2019 is not financial or political but moral.

Whatever the obstacles facing the Green New Deal, we should cheer its arrival. It makes a point, raises a flag, sounds an alarm.

In a cynical world, invoking “moral” to justify change is dangerous; you risk being called precious or pious. When nations invoke a moral argument, they can sound self-righteous. Dean Acheson, U.S. Secretary of State, once called Canada the “stern daughter of the voice of God.”

But now, more than ever, the strongest argument for governments to act decisively on climate change is moral. It says that to do nothing – as Donald Trump and his school believe – is to ignore principle and shirk responsibility for the future of this Earth and those who will inherit it.

It is to say that we have no duty to our children. It is to say that we will not make best efforts to leave them what we have enjoyed: a world of clean water and clean air and sustainable agriculture.

Moral does not necessarily mean religious, though there is surely a spiritual argument to be made for caring for the planet. Preserving the environment need not be buttressed by faith or God, but simply by doing the right thing for humanity.

In 1963, John F. Kennedy introduced sweeping civil rights legislation, a watershed in American history. In an eloquent televised address, he declared that accepting the right of black Americans to live like white Americans was no longer a legal question, demanding the rule of law through the use of injunctions and court orders.

U.S. President John Fitzgerald Kennedy did not think of civil rights as a mere legal question, but as a moral one.- /
AFP/Getty Images

In the face of die-hard segregationists, the federal government could continue to go to the courts and send in the army, as it did to integrate the big state universities in Mississippi and Alabama in 1962 and 1963. No, said Kennedy, civil rights was no longer about the law. It was about morality.

And so it is with the environment today. Racial equality was the great challenge of the last generation in the United States and national unity was the great challenge of the last generation in Canada. Today, everywhere, the great challenge of our generation is preserving the environment.

The effects of climate change are everywhere: Rising oceans, higher temperatures, biblical floods, rampaging wildfires, fierce hurricanes. The storied snows of Kilimanjaro, the glaciers of Greenland and the coral reefs of Australia are disappearing. The five warmest years on record have been the last five.

Global warming is not a threat. It is a reality. It is here. Now.

Reasonable people can disagree on the right response to the problem, such as Canada’s carbon tax, which is smart, or the Green New Deal, which is aspirational. But they cannot disagree on the problem itself and the need for a solution. That’s clear as Arctic ice – or what’s left of it.

Global warming is a global emergency, pure and simple. And saving the planet is the great moral challenge of our time.

Andrew Cohen is a journalist, professor and author of Two Days in June: John F. Kennedy and the 48 Hours That Made History.

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